alt Hacker NewsPatents aren’t the only means of copying something. I would imagine China has a very sophisticated reverse engineering skill set. Made even easier since pretty much everything is made there so if you want the specs of some component you can just call someone up.
So?
The entire Personal Computer revolution was built from reverse engineering the IBM PC, to start the clone market, which was legal in the US!
On the software side, both Apple and Microsoft were cribbing notes from all sorts of other places.
Remixing and iterating on mostly free ideas is literally how the US used to build things!
People get all huffy and puffy about how the US has stagnated and doesn't build anymore, and in the same breath get pissed that China doesn't kneel to our absurd IP laws!
The US COULD compete if we put building shit ahead of rewarding some shithead capitalist for someone else's work.